In the video, the actor poses with the dead animal and explains that thanks to
his watch, he was on time to kill the deer

Gérard Depardieu starring in the luxury watch advertPhoto: YouTube

By Rory Mulholland, Paris

3:42PM GMT 31 Jan 2016

Gérard Depardieu, the larger-than-life actor, has been ridiculed in the French media for posing, hunting rifle in hand, with a dead deer in a video advertisement for a Russian watchmaker.

The 51-second clip opens with the sound of a gunshot, then shows Depardieu kneeling over the dead animal and saying: “To smoke (kill) a deer, you must always be on time.”

The actor explains that with the help of his Custos watch he was on time to bag this deer, and then, a bullet in one hand and his rifle in the other, he blows a kiss at the beast and says: “His time had come.”

There was general derision in French news reports on the new advert, the second one the notoriously badly behaved actor has made for the watchmaker from Russia, of which he is now a citizen.

GQ magazine sneered at what it saw as “nauseous wordplay and pathetic production quality,” while Le Figaro newspaper’s headline was “Gérard Depardieu ‘smokes deers’ in an absurd advert.”

There have been several incidents in the last 12 months, chief among them the shooting of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, when pictures of hunters posing in front of wild beasts they have hunted caused controversy.